Meet the Boss: Weili Dai, Marvell Technology Group

Suzanne Herel

Published 4:00 am, Monday, June 6, 2011

Photo: Anna Vignet, The Chronicle

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Weili Dai is the co-founder of Marvell in Santa Clara, the third largest semiconductor maker in the world. Weili founded the company in 1995 with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, and Sehat's brother Pantaj from their kitchen table. Within 10 years, they were all individually named to the Forbes 400.
Ran on: 06-06-2011
Weili Dai: &quo;Team sports are very key. They help you learn the discipline.'' less

Weili Dai is the co-founder of Marvell in Santa Clara, the third largest semiconductor maker in the world. Weili founded the company in 1995 with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, and Sehat's brother Pantaj from ... more

Photo: Anna Vignet, The Chronicle

Meet the Boss: Weili Dai, Marvell Technology Group

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Weili Dai's philosophy of life, whether at home or in the office, is based on two words: fair and care.

"I have a very basic philosophy, thanks to my parents," said Dai, 49. "I think it's a secret recipe of success."

If her own accomplishments are any indication, she's right on the money.

Shanghai-born Dai, who with her husband and his brother co-founded Marvell Technology Group 16 years ago, by many accounts is one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in the world.

Marvell, in Santa Clara, is the third-largest fabless semiconductor company, with a market cap of about $10 billion. Meanwhile, a Forbes magazine article about the richest women at the Davos World Economic Forum this year pegged Dai's net worth at $920 million.

Pretty good for someone who came to the United States at the age of 17 speaking virtually no English.

That was 1979, when Dai's parents - her father was chief engineer at a big tech company, her mother head nurse at a Shanghai hospital - moved her and two older brothers to the Sunset District in San Francisco, where Dai attended one year of high school at Abraham Lincoln before being accepted at UC Berkeley.

Loves math and science

A lifelong lover of math and physics, Dai was studying computer science when she met fellow student and future husband Sehat Sutardja.

"We were nerds," Dai said. "My background is in software; my husband's is in chip design."

Dai digs in her purse and pulls out a picture of Sutardja as a 13-year-old. "It's his certificate to work as a radio repairman," she said with a laugh.

Dai said she and her husband were attracted to the freedom inherent in owning your own company. Marvell - a nod to the word marvelous - was born around a kitchen table, with its first market in data storage, and its first multimillion-dollar customer found using the Yellow Pages. In 2000, they took Marvell public.

Within 10 years of the company's inception, all three founders were individually named to Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans.

"Today if you look at all the disk drives, the majority of silicon (chips) are made by us. We have 70 percent market share," Dai said. "Not too many people know we are the leader for the print market - Lexmark, HP, open them up, the semiconductor is coming from Marvell."

Willing to partner

But Dai, a big believer in teamwork, has no problem partnering with the competition, including Intel, if it means making the industry stronger and the end-user's experience better.

"I'm not focusing on cutting corners for you. The key is to pick the winning team, and then be very fair and take care of my partners so we both win," she said.

Dai knows teams. From the age of 9 to 14, she played semiprofessional basketball in China. She can still dribble like she's got superglue in her hand, she said, and is proud of her "Michael Jordan layup."

She credits her involvement in sports for her unflagging energy.

"It gave me self-confidence and a good foundation, so I can work 24/7 and people ask me, 'How come you're never tired?'

"Team sports are very key," she said. "They help you learn the discipline. And playing any type of sports, that gives you this passion for winning."

Underscoring the teamwork theme, Dai doesn't have an office - she works in a cubicle like everyone else. While others might view her as a boss, Dai said, she considers herself a caretaker.

She encourages employees - 3,000 in the United States and another 3,000 spread around the world - to invite family to visit at work. There, they'll find a 6,000-gallon fish tank, a coffee shop, basketball and volleyball courts and an exercise facility.

Her own family is deeply tied to engineering and computing - and UC Berkeley. Dai's brothers are fellow graduates; her two sons study electrical engineering there; and her niece and nephew just got accepted. Marvell's founders, major donors to the university, welcomed the opening in February 2009 of Sutardja Dai Hall, home to the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Dai has led a number of philanthropic efforts to give back to the community, including the One Laptop Per Child program. She also mentors women from other countries.

'More female leaders'

"The world is going to be very different if we empower more female leaders," Dai said.

Of course, there have been challenges along the way.

Most notable, perhaps, was the widespread stock-option backdating scandal several years ago that led to Dai stepping down as chief operating officer. In 2008, Marvell paid a $10 million fine to settle the charges, and Dai was barred from serving as a director or officer for five years. She now is vice president and general manager of communications and consumer business.

More recently, Dai and her husband filed suit against Goldman Sachs - which took Marvell public - saying the investment bank duped them into selling much of their stock in the company at the height of the financial crisis so it could buy them.

Overall, however, the future looks bright. Marvell's first-quarter results sparked an 11.1 percent jump in its share price, and the revenue forecast for the current quarter topped Wall Street's estimates.

Marvell has been busy acquiring companies to expand, like mobile media software maker Kinoma Inc. Dai and her husband also traveled to Israel in recent weeks to announce an annual investment of $200 million in its two research and development centers in that country. Marvell, in fact, is one of the biggest investors in Israeli high tech.

Dai sees no end or limit to what Marvell can accomplish in coming years.

Said Dai, "We are very long-term, and we are crazy passionate technology people."

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